


and life steps almost straight

by espressohno



Series: to sit in a library [4]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Friendship, M/M, Recovery, jim and christine are bffs, not even a parallel just a repeated scene from jim's perspective, some angst but mostly happy feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 17:59:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6480907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/espressohno/pseuds/espressohno
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>fourth part of jim's backstory from <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6272059">this au</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	and life steps almost straight

**Author's Note:**

> title is from We Grow Accustomed to the Dark by Emily Dickinson (which can be found in the end notes)  
> this is just a series of scenes as Jim settles back into the world and Christine is awesome and Chekov somehow slipped in there when I wasn't looking   
> thanks for reading!

The blue-white lights of the grocery store flickered just slightly in a slow, repetitive sequence, to the point where Jim worried he was just imagining it. He had already been standing aimlessly in the freezer aisle for maybe ten minutes. He forgot if he was in here to get something or not, or if this was just the shitty state of his life now, getting lost all the time and forgetting what he was supposed to be doing. 

Jim dragged a hand down his face. He tried to open his eyes wider, focused on actually seeing and reading labels instead of just letting it all blur. 

_ Pizza _ , he remembered,  _ I’m getting a pizza. _

He searched the freezers for pizza, and was on his way to the next aisle over when he accidentally collided chest-to-chest with someone. 

Okay, now he was awake. 

“Shit, sorry.” He mumbled, looking down to see that both of their baskets’ contents had managed to fall out onto the floor. When he actually had the sense to look up from the ground he realized that he had just bumped into Christine from the library.

“Oh hey, Jim.” She smiled, apparently not at all bothered. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and knelt down to pick up her groceries. Jim tentatively squatted down next to her. He tried to remember what he had already put in his basket. 

_ Pasta, okay, I think this is mine, and the bacon. Shit, those are my eggs, too, aren’t they. Shit.  _

Jim tried to round everything up, cringing at his carton of eggs which was very visibly dripping when he picked it up. He sorted through to make sure he didn’t forget anything, passing Christine everything else. 

“Sorry about that.” Jim said again. He stood up. The eggs dripped more. 

“Don’t worry about it,” She waved her hand absently, “how are you? It’s been a while.”

“Well.” He sighed, gestured to the egg dripping out of his basket. She seemed to understand.

“I see.”

“I guess life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?” He said against his better judgement.

Christine squinted at him, clearly trying not to give in and smile at that. Jim laughed awkwardly because the only other response he could come up with was _ I hate myself _ . 

“Here,” She looped their arms together, “why don’t we….go put that back before anybody catches us.” Jim lagged behind awkwardly while she pulled him back towards eggs and milk. 

She switched out the eggs while Jim stood watch (as per her request), and then they rushed into the next aisle like paranoid teenagers. 

“I feel like we probably should have told an employee or something.” Jim said, looking at the shelves of yogurt and wondering if he even liked yogurt. He threw some into his basket anyway. 

“It’s fine.” Christine dismissed, reaching for a tub of greek yogurt. “Not the worst crime you can commit in a Kroger at nine pm.”

Jim forced himself to laugh a little bit, but it came out strained and almost sad. 

Christine walked with him through the rest of the store, which turned out to be really nice, because talking to her kept him awake and distracted and sane. She made him spend forever in the coffee and tea aisle, though, after he made the mistake of reaching for a can of Folgers, and he ended up buying some obscure local brand and wondering why the hell it mattered. 

“Coffee always tastes like acid and dirt anyway. I just drink it for the caffeine.” He mumbled. 

“You poor baby.” She said dramatically, and then a little more seriously, “Don’t worry. I’ll teach you everything.” 

Jim grunted in agreement, because he could tell that she wasn’t offering him a decision on the matter. They talked through the entire trip, about Atlanta and the library and their current lives and, thankfully, not much at all about their pasts. 

He walked Christine back to her apartment, feeling tired and, for once, probably the closest he had been to happy in a long time. Something was still bothering him, though, at the back corner of his mind. Something that felt an awful lot like he was lying to Christine by omission, that maybe his first friend since high school should probably know what kind of mess she was getting herself into. Jim tried to press it back down and shut himself up but the words tumbled out right as Christine was closing the door. 

“Hey, wait, uh, Christine.” 

She held the door open again, raised an eyebrow at him. He reminded himself not to panic, Christine was probably the one who had reason to panic, Jim was a goddamn criminal, except he  _ wasn’t _ a criminal, not really, as long as she understood  _ that _ everything might be  _ fine _ \--

“Listen, I should probably tell you this off the bat, um.”

Christine looked concerned. Jim panicked. 

“I was in prison for the last year and a half.”

“Oh.” 

She looked less concerned for some reason. Jim wondered what the hell she must have been expecting him to say that  _ I just got out of prison _ is actually a relief.

“Yeah. Just,” He slumped, his hands starting to sweat uncomfortably into the paper of his grocery bags, “just in case that’s...a problem.” 

At the very least, it wasn’t the  _ worst  _ way he could have said it.

Christine texted him the next morning with  _ I just realized you probably don’t have a coffee bean grinder. We’re getting you one. _ which Jim understood to mean that it wasn’t a problem. 

 

***

 

The end of Jim’s parole and the beginning of his becoming a full-fledged coffee snob, bean grinder and french press and all, occurred about at the same time. Christine decided they needed to celebrate both. She showed up to his apartment that night with two bottles of champagne and a grocery store cheesecake sampler and a stupid smile on her face. 

They sprawled out on Jim’s bed, because it was really the only item of furniture he owned at the moment, and ate and drank until talking became easier. 

“I want to quit my job.” Jim said, so full of cake that he couldn’t keep his thoughts inside him any longer. He slouched against the wall. 

“Then do it.” Christine took another sip, straight from the bottle, and passed it over to him. “Wait, where do you work again?”

“Footlocker.”

Christine snorted. 

“Yeah, you should definitely quit.”

“It’s not like I have any other options.”

“That’s not true.”

Jim looked at her sideways. He was tempted to remind her that she was speaking to an  _ ex-con college dropout with no work experience and no marketable skills _ but she already knew all of that. 

“Who the hell would hire me at this point.” He whined. 

“Wait a minute.” Christine sat up, fumbling around the bed for her phone. She typed on it for like ten minutes before looking back up at him. “The Library.”

Jim laughed. 

“You’re fucking with me.”

“Okay, well, you have no prior experience so we’d have to start you off part time.”

“There it is.” He swallowed an irresponsible amount of champagne. 

“No, Jim, listen to me. You could work part time and then you can go back to college.”

“You’re drunk, Chris.”

“And you’re only 24 years old.”

Jim slouched further down the wall. At some point over the last two years he must have just accepted the idea that it was too late for him, that there was no point in trying to be successful anymore. Whatever ambitions he may have had as a teenager were out the fucking window before he even left Iowa with Gary. 

Christine must have been reading his mind in that moment.

“It’s not too late, Jim. Hey. Listen.”

She shook his shoulder, poked his face until he finally forced his eyes open and glared at her. 

“It’s not too late.”

Jim closed his eyes again and took a shaky breath. He wanted to say  _ yes, it is too fucking late _ but he couldn’t trust his voice not to break over the words. Christine moved the cheesecake aside and leaned over to rest her head on his shoulder, cradling the almost-empty champagne bottle against her chest. She sighed sleepily. 

“I’m gonna keep saying that until you believe it.”

Christine said she would buy them breakfast the next morning, because both of them were hungover and bitchy and there was no chance in hell that cooking was happening. If Jim was sober, he would have been skeptical of Christine’s generosity extending to a second meal, and it really shouldn’t have been a surprise when Jim looked out of the window of the 24-hour diner she dragged him to and realized that they were sitting literally across the street from the community college. 

He whined and dropped his forehead to the table. 

 

***

 

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be in here.” 

Jim looked up from his computer science assignment, which he had tried to do at his apartment but, given the fact that the closest thing he had to a desk was his kitchen counter, he finally gave up and came to the library. There was a room marked Employees Only on the second floor that turned out to just be full of folded up tables and stacks of chairs. He was an employee,  _ technically _ , even though he wasn’t on shift. He figured that was valid enough for him to set up camp. 

Computer science was the only class he didn’t end up hating, because every other course he had to sign up for was just a repeat of the classes he’d dropped in Iowa. He sat, bored, through hours of classes he’d already been to years ago, and the only thing that kept him from skipping and dropping out again was Christine’s frequent encouragement (and less frequent threats). 

Jim liked programming because he was good at it, and not in the same way he was good at playing the system in high school and getting good grades and test scores with minimal effort. Programming made sense to him, like a language he was born knowing but never allowed to speak before. 

He was working on an extra-credit assignment, because the actual assignment was easy and he finished it during class. He had unfolded one of the tables that was leaning against the wall, pulled a chair off of the stack and enjoyed the solitude of having a place to work alone, surrounded just by his thoughts and the clicking of his keyboard. 

Naturally, Christine managed to find him here, because she was so damn intuitive that she could probably completely forego all methods of verbal communication if she wanted to. Jim worried for a fleeting moment if he was breaking some sort of rule, after Christine’s remark of  _ I don’t think you’re supposed to be in here _ . 

“Aren’t you the library director?” He asked, leaning back in the stiff plastic chair. His eyes were a little blurry from staring at the screen for so long. 

“Good point.” She said, slipping inside, “I guess I’m more confused on why you’re here outside your shift and sitting in this random storage room.”

Jim shrugged.

“I like working here. Even though this chair is garbage.” 

She pulled another chair down from one of the stacks on the other side of the room, carried it over to Jim’s makeshift workspace and sat down. 

“Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be working?”

“I put Janice on desk.” Christine dismissed, leaning closer to look at Jim’s laptop screen. “Programming?”

“Yeah.” Jim felt an odd sense of warmth flood his chest, some response to feeling  _ useful _ and  _ good at something _ that he hadn’t felt in a long time. 

“I told you you would like it.” She smiled triumphantly, crossing her legs and attempting to settle into the chair. She shifted uncomfortably for a minute. 

“You’re right, Jim. These chairs are garbage.”

Christine sat quietly while Jim went back to work for a little bit, but he kept spacing out and coming back and losing his train of thought. He sighed and leaned away from the table again, rubbed his eyes and reminded himself that Christine was probably the best source of support in his life at the moment. 

“I keep thinking…” The thought had crossed his mind more than once since he started classes, joining all of the other thoughts that still kept him up at night. “I keep thinking about if I had taken these classes before, if that could’ve…”  _ kept me from dropping school to run off with my asshole drug dealer boyfriend _ . “If things would be different.”

Christine thought for a minute, running her fingers through her hair. Her gaze was still pointed at the computer, but Jim had the sense that it was directed elsewhere. 

“You haven’t been sleeping, have you.”

“No.” Jim breathed. 

“I mean I can’t tell you to just _ stop _ thinking about things like that.”

“You don’t have a pep talk for me this time?” Jim joked, his voice a little hollow. Christine was usually a good motivator whenever he voiced his complaints with classes and his life and the universe, even if it all boiled down to  _ if you don’t do your homework I’m going to wax off your eyebrows in your sleep. Don’t doubt me _ . Jim was becoming better about talking through his feelings, mostly because Christine was the kind of person who wouldn’t rest until she forced them out into the daylight. 

“Pep talks don’t do shit when the situation is out of your control.” 

He nodded dumbly, because she was right, even though he didn’t really want her to be. At the very least, she was there, and it was encouragement enough to have someone who still hadn’t left after a year of seeing Jim in worse states than this. He shut his laptop and scooted his chair over so he could rest his head on her shoulder. Christine always smelled like some combination of fabric softener and faded perfume, so entirely normal and yet uniquely hers. Jim closed his eyes as she shifted to make them more comfortable.

Her arm wrapped around his shoulders and he felt, unquestionably, like a child being comforted, and yet it didn’t seem to bother him. 

“This is it, now.” Christine said after a while, sounding as if she were reassuring herself as much as she was reassuring Jim, “We can imagine all we want, but we can’t change how we got here.”

“Yeah.” Jim whispered, “I’m sorry I’m like this.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“I can’t help it.”

“How about instead of apologizing all the time you just do your damn homework.”

Jim snorted. Christine was really only a few years older than him, but in that moment she was more of a mother, more of an older sibling, more of a family than Jim had ever known. 

“Deal.”

 

***

 

Once during work Jim had caught himself considering going back to school, studying for a second degree or building up the credits to apply to graduate school, and he almost laughed out loud at how he didn’t recognize himself anymore. He didn’t recognize the way he talked, the way he felt when he woke up and did housework and cooked himself actual meals. He didn’t recognize the man he saw in the mirror every morning--brushing his teeth and mentally organizing his day--and he hardly recognized his tired face at night. 

His idea of what he looked like, from glimpses of himself in the dusty bathroom mirror of the Riverside bar, the photos Gary would take of him in clean, hotel beds, his pale face under the flourescent lights of the prison bathroom, all fleeting moments that somehow combined to look back at him from the mirror in distaste, they were all memories now. He watched as those versions of himself, the pale skin and purple bruises and hooded eyes of his youth, faded slowly from his face. The man he saw every morning was entirely new, from a life that he had built for himself. 

He smiled in the mirror one morning,  _ Tuesday _ , his mind quickly supplied, because he did that now. He knew what day it was and he practiced smiling in the mirror and he wrote grocery lists and to-do lists and reminders on sticky notes. 

There was one on the mirror that he’d hastily written the night before:  _ have pavel check for bugs in the database, clean out the freezer, return that sign language book you fucking idiot.  _ He pulled it off the mirror and shoved it in his pocket, fluffed his hair once more before going to the kitchen for breakfast. 

Jim averaged three bowls of cereal every morning, because for all his responsibility and maturity he’d developed he was still bad at remembering to eat lunch. He finished off a box of Cinnamon Chex, wondering if eating would ever become boring again. If it wasn’t for his shitty salary and student loans he would probably be at least fifty pounds heavier, because eating was still  _ so good _ . He hadn’t yet forgotten the feeling of his first meal outside of prison, although god would probably never let him forget the time he literally cried over a fast food combo. 

He made coffee and poured a reckless amount of cream in it, carried his mug around the apartment while he searched for his overdue book. He was still living in the same shithole he’d moved to straight out of prison, which he could only afford out of the charity of some ex-con program and whatever was left in his bank account before he was arrested. It was at least moderately decorated now, bordering on crowded after two Christmases and three birthdays celebrated with the library staff, and about half a dozen miscellaneous shopping trips forced upon him by Christine Chapel. He had a creaky futon couch, a coffee table,  _ actual picture frames _ that held random thrift-store wall art and, most importantly, his college degree. 

From first glance it all felt weirdly staged, and yet, this was home. Everything in it was his. 

Jim finally found the book buried under newspapers and receipts on his coffee table. He shoved it in his backpack with his laptop and a half-empty water bottle, downed the rest of his coffee and hurried out to catch the early bus.  

Christine was already making the rounds when he got there, turning on lights and adjusting thermostats around the library. He scanned his sign language book into returns and went to shelve it. Sometime after graduating last summer he’d got it in his head that he would learn a language, and sign language was (if he’s including Latin in high school) his sixth attempt. 

He slipped the book back on the shelf and decided to try German next. 

The other employees showed up as it got closer to opening time. Jim wasn’t exactly friends with everyone yet, even though he’d been working there for two years now, because he still couldn’t shake the habit of avoiding people until they approached him first, but he offered smiles and nods and pulled his shirtsleeves down his elbows to hide the ink on his arms. 

Pavel walked in and Jim relaxed a little bit. When they hired him Jim was no longer the youngest employee, because Pavel Chekov was some sort of Russian whiz kid who flew through high school and got a full ride to Georgia Tech for Electrical Engineering. He started working part time and was an efficient, if occasionally brain dead, library page. 

Jim, by some miracle, was the only one who could keep up with him when he talked about his major. They tended to bounce off of one another whenever they had shifts together; Pavel would slip him physics problems and math proofs and lines of code when they passed each other. Jim would solve them and respond with more, or, if Pavel had managed to outsmart him, he would just erase the problem and scribble  _ fuck off _ and toss it at him from behind the desk. 

Pavel clipped his badge onto his shirt and slumped. 

“Every day of my life it is like I have class at 8 am or work at 8 am.” He said, desperately monotone, “There is no escape.” 

“You’ll get used to it.” Christine called from...somewhere. It didn’t matter, because she seemed to have ears all over the library. 

“I am used to it!” Pavel whined, “That’s why it’s a problem.”

Jim patted the kid’s head, half as a comforting gesture and half to test if his curly hair would bounce back into place. It did almost immediately. 

“Hey I need you to check my program for bugs again.”

Pavel perked up.

“You fixed it?”

“Maybe.” Jim shrugged. 

“I should just switch my major to computer science and graduate so I can take your job.” 

“Over my dead body.” Christine finally emerged from the stacks and joined them at the front desk. She pointed right at Pavel. “If you’re not flying spaceships by the time you’re Jim’s age I’ll see to it that every federally owned library has you blacklisted.”

“You can do that?” 

“I wouldn’t doubt her.” Jim said, feeling oddly jittery over realizing again that he was here, at his job, with his friends. There were still little things, like eating and seeing his Computer Science degree and shopping at _ the Gap _ , that he still hadn’t grown accustomed to, but seeing people he loved every day, and doing things he loved every day, had almost seamlessly fit into his life, so much so that he hardly ever stopped to think about it. 

“Who wants coffee?” He asked, because that was the best way to avoid crying happy, uninhibited tears and creeping out the library visitors. 

Both Christine and Pavel nodded, with varying degrees of excitement and/or sheer, physical need. Jim headed to the break room and made the first pot of coffee for the day. 

 

It was around the third pot, when the part-time employees cycled out (and Pavel gave Jim back his flash drive with the program on it, and three accompanying pages of notes, before heading to class), that Jim saw Christine again. They sat in the lone plastic table in the break room, drinking coffee silently while Jim typed away on his laptop. 

“Hey, Jim, do you think you can close up tonight?” 

Jim looked up from the screen. He squinted his eyes to try and adjust them to the world again. 

“Yeah, sure.” He’d closed the library before. It just meant making sure all of the collectibles were locked back in their cases and the computers shut down, and then turning the lights out and the air conditioner off and locking the front doors. The library was huge and creepy at night but Jim could do it. 

“Thanks.” Christine finished her coffee and stood up, “By the way, have you considered glasses?”

Jim looked back at the screen, which was pretty blurry at first glance.  _ Shit, have I been squinting this whole time? _

“You keep squinting at everything.” She added. 

“Shit.” Jim leaned back in his chair. He rubbed his eyes, laughing. “Do my benefits cover glasses?”

“Hell if I know.” 

Christine threw her cup in the recycle bin on the way out.

“You  _ should _ know. You’re the  _ library director! _ ” He called after her. She turned around for a second, standing in the doorway. 

“Oh, I forgot to mention. There’s some guy who’s been sitting at the table between Religion and Self Help for the last hour. He hasn’t moved at all since he got here. You might have to kick him out.” 

“Okay.” Jim agreed absently. He’d gone back to squinting at his computer.

In the end, Christine was right, because Jim had shut down all the computers and locked the collectibles cases and was on his way to shut out the lights when he passed the Self Help section and saw a man still sitting at the table. It had been probably three hours since Christine had told Jim about this guy, which meant he had been sitting at the same table for a total of four hours. 

As a sort of aficionado of zoning out and wasting hours at a time, Jim was almost impressed. 

He approached the table, expecting him to sense Jim approaching and look up and, hopefully, understand without it being said that it was time for him to go. It didn’t quite work like that. Jim was able to stand right over him without disturbing him at all; he must have been completely out of it. 

Jim stayed quiet for a second, fearing the confrontation that was inevitable, fearing even more the small chance that this man had somehow died in his chair. He looked as good as dead, slouched heavily over a book with his head resting on one hand, face barely visible enough for Jim to notice patchy stubble and dark eyes. It took Jim all of two seconds to see his wrinkled clothes and furrowed brow and shallow breaths and know that this man was probably going through a much worse hell than the never ending cycle of shifts at Footlocker and drug counseling and meetings at the parole office that had landed Jim in a similar position. 

The book he was slouched over (and not reading) read  _ A Comprehensive Look at Alcohol Addiction _ when Jim squinted at the page. He really did need glasses.  

“Trying to self diagnose?” Jim finally spoke up. He was shooting for gentle amusement, something to rouse they guy from whatever haze he’d fallen into and maybe make him not hate Jim while he kicked him out. He heard his own voice going too dry, bordering on straight up mockery, and wanted to punch himself as the man slowly, pitifully raised his head to glare daggers at him. 

“What...the fuck...do you want from me.” He drawled, with a rough southern accent that revealed a Georgia background and some definite long-term sleep loss. Jim smiled at him, because he didn’t know what else there was to do. He stood frozen for a minute, making way-too-intense eye contact with this clearly unstable stranger who was also the only other person in the library and could probably get away with killing Jim right now. 

If Christine was still here he would have called in for backup, letting her handle the situation with her compassion and her quiet support and all of her other interpersonal skills that Jim would probably never have. But it was just him, and this man had to get out of the library before Jim could go home. 

“Don’t make me repeat myself, kid.” He spoke again, his voice empty. Jim breathed out a laugh at himself. He was so bad at this. 

“Did you just laugh at me? Something funny about a man who’s about to lose everything important in his life, asshole?”

_ Fuck I fucked up. Fuck. This is how I’m going to die. _ Jim steeled himself. All he had to do was get the words out and hopefully everything would happen and he could go home and go back to pretending he wasn’t still socially inept. 

“Sorry. I came here to tell you the library’s about to close. I shouldn’t have made the joke in the first place.” He blurted it all out in record time, still keeping eye contact even though it only increased his internal fight or flight response. He was a few seconds of this man’s glare away from fleeing and just letting him have the library to himself all night. 

“Sorry.” Jim repeated, in lieu of  _ please get out I want to go home _ . He was still forcing himself to smile which started to feel like poor judgement. The man’s frown only worsened. 

“Stop it.” He grunted. 

“Stop what?”

“Stop apologizing and leave me alone.”

Jim wanted to sigh, loudly. He could feel his smile, mostly fake at this point, twitching a little bit from fatigue. 

“The library’s closing in…” he checked his watch, even though he could sense that it was already past nine, “two minutes ago. I’m sorry, but you need to leave.” 

The man sighed, rubbed his face with his hands and eventually got up while Jim stood frozen next to the table. He assumed that he didn’t need to escort him or anything, so he just stayed there and listened for the front doors opening, the only sound in the quiet library. 

He picked up the book, scanned the spine and returned it to the shelf. Thoughts about the encounter plagued him for the rest of the night, because he was sure there had to have been a better way to handle it. 

“ _ I just need to get over it. _ ” Jim muttered to himself, fumbling with the locks while his mind was elsewhere, set on over thinking the last twenty minutes until the memory didn’t make him feel shitty anymore. He thought about--whoever it was, the man who felt lost enough to spend his entire afternoon hiding in the library--with the deep accent and sad eyes, and more than anything he hoped everything would be okay for him. 

**Author's Note:**

> We grow accustomed to the Dark -  
> When Light is put away -  
> As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp  
> To witness her Good bye -
> 
> A Moment - We Uncertain step  
> For newness of the night -  
> Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -  
> And meet the Road - erect -
> 
> And so of larger - Darknesses -  
> Those Evenings of the Brain -  
> When not a Moon disclose a sign -  
> Or Star - come out - within -
> 
> The Bravest - grope a little -  
> And sometimes hit a Tree  
> Directly in the Forehead -  
> But as they learn to see -
> 
> Either the Darkness alters -  
> Or something in the sight  
> Adjusts itself to Midnight -  
> And Life steps almost straight.
> 
> _by Emily Dickinson_


End file.
